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Technical features

So today we are peeking at the Enermax Infinity 650Watt PSU. With 650 Watts the PSU falls in the category high-end. Although not a Galaxy 1000 Watts, it most certainly is capable enough of running a dedicated high-end PC. The PSU also comes with a lot of features I like very much.

The PSU as tested today is a truly heavily built SLI/Crossfire ready piece of gear. You will notice that all supplied connectors are nicely wrapped in a colored foil and are detachable (modular). That is looking good for sure for any tidy look and feel. It has advanced cable management and gives you the option to only use the required cables. It's a high-end PSU which is ready for SLI and Crossfire as it has three 12 volts rails with high amperage, active PFC, silent fan and quad-core CPU ready.

DXX - First and foremost you now will spot convertible 6+2p (6/8p) connectors. This means you could hook up two of the new Radeon R600 cards in Crossfire, as such cards have 8-pin connectors, thus the the PSU is PCI-Express 2.0 ready. The original PCI-Express bus can't provide enough power for even today's mid-range products. That bus right now will push 75 Watts maximum. For new 2.0 standard future mainboards this spec has been changed and will be doubled up. In the near future you'll see 225 or 300 Watts flowing over that bus.

Regular 6-pin PCI-Express connector to the left and on it's right the new convertible 6+2p (6/8p) connector on AMD's Radeon HD 2900 XT.

Power Efficiency
Judging from the specs the power efficiency of the Infinity is nothing to be ashamed about either as it is rated at 82-85% overall efficiency. Measured at 230V (which we use here in Europe).

But what does that mean? The Power Efficiency of a power supply?

First and foremost; the higher the better, efficiency is good! When power is drawn from your wall socket and travels into your power supply, not all of it is transformed into electricity that your computer consumes. A rather large part of that current will get lost as there is heat that is dissipating in the capacitors or leakage in circuits and other insufficiencies. So it boils down to this: if your computer requires 500 watts of power, a power supply will draw more than that from your electric company. Here's an example:

If you have a generic power supply with an average 70% efficiency a 350 power draw (350/70x100) watt load would mean it is drawing 500 watts of current from your wall socket, while your PC only uses 350 watts. Interesting eh ?

Let's do that math again with the Infinity, yet this time with a 85% power efficiency in mind: 350/85x100= 412 Watt. So that's saving 88 Watts over a 70% efficient product. If you have your PC powered on a lot , think about this theory and what it can save you in the long term.

The higher the efficiency the less power loss, the less money you have to pay. And hey it's good for mother nature as well.

So next to being a really capable and efficient PSU, what does this PSU have to offer as well ?

Features:

• DXX ready for PCI Express 2.0 / DXX next generation graphic cards with 6+2P (8P) PCI EXPRESS connector.
  -more info about how to use 6+2P (8P)PCI-E connector-
• 80PLUS certified
• Nvidia® SLI certified. (ENERMAX INFINITI 650 SLI EIN650AWT-00) Nvidia, SLI are registered trademarks or trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation.
• DUAL QUAD TRIPLE + 18:
  DUAL CPU, QUAD CORE, TRIPLE GRAPHICS + 18 DRIVES.
• 24/7 @ 40°C:
  Running with full power in industrial environments.
• 82-85% efficiency @ 20-100% load:
  Minimizing your electricity bill.
• Modular Cables:
  SATA or PATA without restrictions.
• Three separated 12V rails:
  The best rail design for this PSU class.
• CoolGuard:
  The new patent feature, running not only PSU fan after shutdown, but all system fans to get the heat out of the system and increasing system lifetime by up to 20%.
• PowerGuard:
  The world's first desktop PSU series with 4-mode PSU status alarm with reset button.
  Leading PCB design:
  The foundation of ENERMAX' philosophy
• Tight & Stable:
  Essential to high-end systems.
• Security:
  OCP, OLP, SCP, OVP, UVP & OTP secure PSU and system from damage.
• Silent & Cool:
  A special 13.5cm fan ensures cool performance and silent operation.

As you can see, some key features are advanced security. If anything happens, then the PSU is intelligent enough to shut down fast. Let me show you what happens/ what's needed to have the PSU shut down to protect itself and your expensive gear on each voltage rail. We test the audible power guard by simply disconnecting the ATX mainboard cable so we could see what would happen. Classic, we do it with most PSU's with some sort of guard function.

An immediate PSU shutdown was initiated after which the PSU started beeping in bursts of two audible beeps. Pretty much stating that there was an unusual system shutdown. With the click on the backside button (we'll show you in a minute), the alarm stops. I'll trust Enermax with the rest of the electrical circuit protections as our test system is roughly worth 2 grand.

To demonstrate we have made a small video of it, pleas click on the play button if you would like to observe that (Windows MediaPlayer ActiveX components are needed for playback). The system was in overclocked status after long usage. It took two minutes before it shutdown, so be patient please :)

Voltage Rails
If we look closer at the voltage rails for a minute we see there's nothing to complain about. There's enough overall juice for anything, yet focus on the three 12 Volts rails. These matter to your CPU and graphics cards, and I do say cards as this PSU judging from the specs can easily manage a multitude of them.

12V1 and 12V2 each have 28AMPs available. Considering a high-end graphics cards can consume roughly 12 AMPs at maximum you can see there's a lot of room to play with. In theory I believe this PSU could handle quad SLI easily. We'll test it with two 8800 GTXes in SLI today though. Next to these two 12V rails we also see yet another 12V3 distribution rail. That one can cope with 30 AMPs which is insane as it will primarily power the CPU(s) only. You can easily add a graphics card to that line as well. Combined and all used togther however you'll drop back to 52 AMPs ~18AMPs which is a ATX requirement. But it can surely peak much higher.
In wattage terms you could hook up-to roughly 450 Watts of GPUs with two quad core CPUs.

Active PFC
This model has a very nice feature called Active PFC. To put it in simple terms, Active PFC PSUs are more expensive and, from a power consumption point of view, more efficient. Power Factor Correction (PFC) allows power distribution to operate at its highest efficiency. There are two types of PFC, Active PFC and Passive PFC. This PSU has Active PFC. Active PFC uses a circuit to correct power factor, Active PFC is able to generate a theoretical power factor of over 95%. Active Power Factor Correction also markedly diminishes total harmonics, automatically corrects for AC input voltage, and is capable of a full range of input voltage. Since Active PFC is the more complex method of Power Factor Correction, it is definitely more expensive to produce an Active PFC power supply.

WarrantyYou'll notice it straight from looking at the box if you purchase it, the PSU has a 3 year warranty which is an reasonable amount of warranty.

Alright... Dual CPU, Quad Core, Triple Graphics + 18 Drive ready. Let's have a look at the photo shoot followed by some testing.